Three Ars writers take the debate to a Tatooine cantina (or an IRC channel).

Lee: Just to warn you—I am an angry Internet nerd with a lot of feelings. Now to start, Disney has a history of commercialization.

Kyle: So does Star Wars.

Lee: Lucas has demonstrated his willingness to slap a Star Wars sticker on EVERYTHING and publish action figures of ANYTHING. You know those dudes guarding Luke in Episode Six at the Pit of Carkoon? On Jabba's hover barge? There were action figures of them. Lucas leaves no stone unturned. And—understatement of the century—I think this is sometimes detrimental. But Disney is often more selective.

Kyle: So let me get this straight. Disney is going to "kill" Star Wars... by milking it less?

Lee: No, but I think we can probably all agree on a larger point: I don't think it's possible Disney will make Star Wars any worse. It's like the tweet said: "Worrying that Disney will ruin Star Wars is like worrying a second iceberg will dive down to hit the Titanic."

Kyle: I'd even say the second iceberg might somehow prop up the Star Wars ship.

Lucas released this roundtable interview talking about today's acquisition. They like the move.

Lee: Eh, Disney's acquisition of Star Wars can't make it any worse, but I bet they won't make it any better, either. The screaming masses of Internet geeks are pretty clear in what they want out of Star Wars. At their most moderate, they want a grown-up universe, filled with grown-up people acting in grown-up ways. The Nerd Fantasy has always been for an R-rated Star Wars. Adult themes and adult drama in a sci-fi setting.

Kyle: Thinking about it, maybe going adult and dark wouldn't entirely put off families. I'm betting a lot of 10-year-olds love Nolan's Dark Knight. And that is not really targeted at kids. If the characters are cool and the fights are awesome, kids will aspire to grown up stories. But this kind of generational battle has always been the key sticking point for Star Wars.

Jonathan: Sure, 30-something fans like me aren't the target market now, just like they weren't for the prequels.

Lee: BUT 30-something fans (like me too!) want to be the target market. Many are pissed that they're not.

Jonathan: Well, be careful what you wish for. Consider Prometheus. It's a film that seemed aimed at the fanboys, and look how it turned out.

Lee: Good point. As a connoisseur of the Alien universe, I had huge problems with the movie.

Jonathan: At some point, maybe we need to accept that books or stories finish, and it's time to spend that creative energy on something new. Perhaps it would be better if Episodes 7-9 remained unwritten?

Kyle: Yes, adult fanboys weren't the target for the first Star Wars movies, but parents could tolerate them. Getting back to audience, I think we overestimate how important hardcore fans are to this. They're so hardcore and they are still hardcore after the prequels. They'll obviously be in for whatever Disney does. If Disney can manage to ignore them and try to make it just a good family movie, the mainstream will come back as much as it ever did.

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Jonathan: Ultimately, the older fans are not important; it's the kids who they want. That's definitely who Lucas was targeting—whoever spends money for the merch! And now, you only have to look at how Disney exploited Cars 2 to see where their hearts lie.

Lee: Yeah, Star Wars was for you when you were nine. It's not for you anymore. And Disney won't make it any better. Not for you, anyway.

Disney won't make a drama featuring married Han Solo and Leia Organa Solo. Disney won't focus on the political difficulties of reconstructing a republic after 25-ish years of empire. Disney won't make a detailed examination of the Jedi faith.

Kyle: I don't expect an adult movie or a kids movie... I want a good family movie. That's what the first two (and arguably the third, original trilogy) were. Sadly, that's tougher to do than going hard to either end of the demographic spectrum.

Lee: The fear among the hardcore, until proven otherwise, will be that Disney won't make a movie you can watch with your kids, but one that's for the kids.

Kyle: Well, Disney is really good at making family movies, so let's hope that's the direction they'll go.

Promoted Comments

This entire conversation is based on the notion that Disney will control the theme and plot of future Star Wars movies.

Disney at one point was going to do direct to video crappy Toy Story sequels, but Pixar wisely convinced them to let Pixar make good sequels.

Disney bought Marvel and let them continue to do their thing with The Avengers.

Today's Disney is to allow each company their creative freedom. They announced today that Kathleen Kennedy is still running Lucasfilm and everyone is keeping their jobs. Steve Sansweet said Lucas already came up with the core stories, and Kathleen Kennedy has been running with them for months. These sequels were already in the works.

Disney said that they've basically picked up the option to produce the script treatments Lucas already started on. This isn't Disney creating their own version of Star Wars. This is Lucasfilm finally delivering their own version.

772 posts | registered Apr 13, 2010

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War Stories | Ultima Online: The virtual ecology

When creating Ultima Online, Richard Garriott had grand dreams. He and Starr Long planned on implementing a virtual ecology into their massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It was an ambitious system, one that would have cows that graze and predators that eat herbivores. However, once the game went live a small problem had arisen...

War Stories | Ultima Online: The virtual ecology

War Stories | Ultima Online: The virtual ecology

When creating Ultima Online, Richard Garriott had grand dreams. He and Starr Long planned on implementing a virtual ecology into their massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It was an ambitious system, one that would have cows that graze and predators that eat herbivores. However, once the game went live a small problem had arisen...

I really want to see it go in same direction as Revenge of the Sith, a little darker, a bit more mature, with some moments of genuine emotional resonance. That film still had appeal to the younger audience, but, of the prequels it held the greatest adult appeal. The humour (or attempts at humour...) were there.Make a few like that and I'd be satisfied. No reboots, no refresh, no weird recastings, please.

And please, PLEASE Disney - I do not ever, EVER, want to see a TV show about Princess Leia's years as a teen singing sensation.

The thing that worries me is that they're planning to release a movie every 2-3 years apparently. I'd prefer they focus on the story before they focus on how often they can pump the movies out (maybe they have, maybe the next trilogy is fully planned out and it is great...yeah...).

These discussions remind me of when Disney acquired Marvel. When it was first announced, everyone started making wild assumptions as to how Disney would fuck up Marvel by making it more disneyish and/or merging all of its IP into the greater Disney brand.

But fast forward to today and everybody has forgotten about it. To the untrained eye, one would never guess that Marvel is now a subsidiary of Disney.

Disney are the grand masters of selective branding. They have whole subsidiaries (such as Miramax) that exist for the sole purpose of not associating the Walt Disney brand with properties that clash with its traditional family-friendly image.

I'm pretty sure that Lucasfilm will be kept distinct from Disney proper, just like Marvel has.

I think Disney, in their quest to attract boys, has done a nice job with Marvel by showing they can step back and let those folks do their thing. It's a lesson they learned with Pixar. As long as Bob Iger is running things, I think we stand a good chance of getting at least entertainment that the whole family can enjoy in a universe than many of us (foolishly?) refuse to give up on.

Longer term, at some point someone more along the lines of an Eisner will be in charge at Disney again and will see the Pixar, Lucas and Marvel fiefdoms and decide that they shouldn't be run independently. That is when you will see folks like John Lassater and to a lesser extent Joe Quesada leaving their positions. I hope it doesn't happen for a long, long time, but whenever it does, it will be too soon.

This entire conversation is based on the notion that Disney will control the theme and plot of future Star Wars movies.

Disney at one point was going to do direct to video crappy Toy Story sequels, but Pixar wisely convinced them to let Pixar make good sequels.

Disney bought Marvel and let them continue to do their thing with The Avengers.

Today's Disney is to allow each company their creative freedom. They announced today that Kathleen Kennedy is still running Lucasfilm and everyone is keeping their jobs. Steve Sansweet said Lucas already came up with the core stories, and Kathleen Kennedy has been running with them for months. These sequels were already in the works.

Disney said that they've basically picked up the option to produce the script treatments Lucas already started on. This isn't Disney creating their own version of Star Wars. This is Lucasfilm finally delivering their own version.

There's quite a bit of material that could make for a good movie. Honestly, Dawn of the Jedi could work for Disney/Pixar. Slightly over-the-top villians, redeemable bad guy, not-so-good-guys, heros, odd beasts, it's all there.

I suspect, though, they'll completely ignore all levels of canon and just wander off on their own.

LOL @ Leia Disney Princess. And yet, I was horrified at the Star Wars Transformers Hasbro made, but they were so well imagined I ended up collecting some of them.

Whatever. I love Star Wars and will forever. Disney has always been closely related to Star Wars since Star Tours. This makes more sense than a lot of things, and having Lucas never be able to make (some) bad decisions with our childhood then tell us "we don't know anything about how good movies are made" was not exactly a good situation either.

Saw 1 in the theater and was pretty disappointed, still haven't finished 2 on dvd, never saw 3. I still have yet to watch 4-6 since. Just saw a clip recently of the redone emperor dying scene. I had heard about the changes, but that was just sad and disappointing.

I'm pretty sure Disney can't make it any worse. I say, enthusiastically, "Bring it on Disney!". Besides, I liked Avengers, Tron and Pirates of the Caribbean much more than I liked the Star Wars prequels.

Can it get worse? Sure it can. We've had three films that, on balance, were good, and three films that, on balance, were bad. That averages out to neutral.

Three more bad films and Star Wars becomes something that is not merely sometimes crap, but is mostly crap.

That's a long ways from the first few moments in 1977 when it was possible to feel that "what comes next is going to be awesome."

Good stories have a beginning, middle and end. Good franchises, too. For good or ill, it was time for Star Wars to end some time ago. Disney cannot breathe new life into this hardly fresh pile of corpses. All it can do is create an army of zombies, and not the good kind.

Disney is a "big evil" copyright leviathan, so I don't consider this "giving back to the fans." But Disney will probably take better care of it than Lucas, who I am pretty sure has a kind of hate for Star Wars and it's fans. "Why doesn't anyone appreciate my other movies!?" Well, Indiana Jones 4 and Red Tails came out and we realize that you kinda suck. George just worked with a lot of talented people that were willing to tell him his ideas were stupid or the technology wasn't there to support some of his dumb ideas.

Imagine if she becomes a Disney Princess and little girls want to dress up in slave Leia costumes, that's even more horrifying. You know some dumb parent out there won't realize how very very wrong that is.

Just saying, this has existed for years, it's not like the companies are really strangers. (And having two daughters who love Star Wars means that I wish I could get more of this kind of thing frankly.)

I love the original trilogy, I grew up watching them and to date myself ESB was the first movie I ever saw in the theater.

Although I didn't like them nearly as much, I did enjoy the prequels as well. I've only seem The Phantom Menace once, but the other two were decent. My favorite scene from any of the prequels was the opening sequence to RoS, when the two star fighters were gliding along side an early star destroyer and when the camera panned they decended into chaos above Coruscant.

Disney has let Marvel and Pixar do their own thing, I think Lucasfilm will be much the same. It might have been part of the deal with Lucas, since he's now a big shareholder in the Disney company. Hopefully, Mr. Lucas will step back a bit and let Lucasfilm put out a solid sequel trilogy, since he's obviously staying on board in some way as a consultant or something.

Good stories have a beginning, middle and end. Good franchises, too. For good or ill, it was time for Star Wars to end some time ago. Disney cannot breathe new life into this hardly fresh pile of corpses. All it can do is create an army of zombies, and not the good kind.

I wouldn't be so certain. Batman was saved by a trilogy with a beginning, middle and end after the train wreck that were the previous movies. Star Wars has the benefit of not having to reboot to tell the story again since Star Wars is not all about Darth Vader and Luke (although I wouldn't be opposed to redoing Ep I-III or at least have someone edit them to fix the Lucas dialog issues).

If we find out that Ep7-9 is more retreading and milking the dead cow I'll agree they're trying to make a zombie cow. Frankly, I hope they go off and make their own completely separate story to completely avoid the issue (I don't care about the expanded universe at this point).

god i hope they release the original star wars trilogy on bluray or something before lucas started messing it up. i'd buy that in a heartbeat. they can put the rest of the crap on a bonfire for all i care.

"The Nerd Fantasy has always been for an R-rated Star Wars. Adult themes and adult drama in a sci-fi setting."

Aw Hell NAW! As Will Smith said. I just want more stuff like A New Hope. Oh wait, that was Abram's Star Trek, and the sequel is coming out next year. Yay!

Abram's Star Trek fills any super fun and exciting sci-fi movie extravaganza that I might otherwise have wanted. That being said, if Disney put Joss Whedon in charge of Episodes 7-9 (as well as his current duties as head of Marvel movies) then I'd suddenly be more interested.